The invention is related to a Graphical User Interface (GUI) and, in particular, a method for graphically displaying on a computer screen results of a search conducted on the Internet, local and remote databases of content providers, etc.
It is widely known that search engines, i.e., computer programs written to perform searches of databases, mainly use three boolean operators "AND", "OR" and "NOT". A typical search request might be "word X AND word Y" where both words must occur in a document to designate a particular document as being of relevance to a user.
There are several problems with these types of search requests. Unless the user enters the desired Boolean operator, the search engine must use a default operator, such as "AND" for example. Furthermore, the user generally cannot use both of the Boolean operators "AND" and "OR" in the same search. In this case, two separate searches are required to be performed to obtain the desired results.
In addition in the prior art, after the request has been entered by the user, the search engine examines multiple documents on the Internet, for example, for the entered keywords. A full text search, a document title search, a document abstract search, etc. may be executed. Depending on the search engine algorithm, which in many cases is proprietary, a list of results is then produced which the search engine determined, according to its algorithm, to be relevant to the user request.
A typical list of search results from the Internet is shown in FIG. 1. The documents are listed in descending order based on their relevancy values. Unless the user carefully examines these figures for each "hit" buried in the list of search results, he or she may be unaware of the large difference in relevancy values between the second and third "hits" in FIG. 1, for example. Furthermore, a list of "hits" in descending order generally indicates that one "hit" is more relevant than the other "hit", because one "hit" is numbered 3 and the other is numbered 4. Yet this is not the case with typical search engines 15 as is apparent from FIG. 1. The two "hits" labeled 102 and 104 in FIG. 1 have the same relevancy but are displayed sequentially, possibly confusing and misleading the user about the search results.